Wilson Greatbatch is an awesome name for a man who invented things all his life. Greatbatch is best known as the inventor of the implantable pacemaker, which came about by accident!

The story goes that, by mistake, he installed a resistor with the wrong resistance, but he recognized that the pulse it created was identical to a normal beating heart.

Mr. Greatbatch realized that this new circuit could potentially be used to control a human heartbeat.

In his spare time, he experimented with his idea of an implantable pacemaker Ñ working upstairs in an old, cedar-sided barn on his property and using his savings to build 50 handmade pacemakers of various designs.

"I had to solve the problem of how to reduce an electronic apparatus in the size of a kitchen cabinet to the size of a baby's hand," he recalled in 1990.

He later founded the company Greatbatch, Inc. which produced lithium batteries for pacemakers and other devices. Greatbatch held over 350 patents when he died on Tuesday at his home in Amherst, New York. He was 92. http://www.buffalonews.com/wire-feeds/24-hour-national-news/article573368.ece -via Gizmodo